


X Marks the Spot

by DoctorScully (Emryslin)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 21:47:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4495860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emryslin/pseuds/DoctorScully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wonders when she realized it for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	X Marks the Spot

She wonders when it happened, when she realized it for the first time. She can't remember. 

It's just as well that it was on their first case that time stopped being a universal invariant, because nothing about the two of them seemed to progress in succession. There was intimacy almost upon introduction, crammed as they were in the too small office with pencils in the ceiling, lights off and slides clicking past on the wall. There was trust before sense and a breath of joy in the freezing Oregon rain. Fear shared and passed; only mosquito bites. Only mosquito bites. She’d been willing to believe, even then. Or scared to.

She stopped seeing her life in shades of grey, instead as a study in stark chiaroscuro, dark rooms and FBI issue flashlight beams, her Sig steady in her hands; partner, protect, preserve. She had never trusted someone so fast or so much. She trusted him more than her own senses, more than her own science. Believing was the easy part. The world set out to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate, and that was the hard part.

Hospital rooms, once as familiar and easy as any other, became harrowing. On the right side and the wrong side of the hospital bed; both sides were the wrong side when either one of them were hurt. She thanked God often that she had gotten her MD before all this, a constant litany of “I’m a medical doctor!” allowing her to enter spaces reserved for spouses and family.

Gravity, planetary force, became so much more than its product of masses and inverse distances; whatever held them together was stronger than the cosmic attraction of two bodies of mass, and the distance separating them never far enough to render it moot. He was a Presence somehow, resolute, a new invariable constant. When nothing else made sense, when Death looked in on them both before looking away, when miracles and plagues happened on their lives, always, always constant.

She resented him sometimes, the ease with which judgments slid off him, the strength of his belief in the Truth, his forgoing of a normal life. She wondered when that resentment became envy, and when that envy became a shared sense of self. He was brilliant and eccentric, if not a little mad, and every case she spent with him made her reconsider the logics and science she’d once held so sacred.

He quoted her thesis back at her. She recited the signs of witchcraft and black magic at him from hundreds of miles away. She held his hand over a hospital bed somewhere, and he held her through the course of bad news. Somewhere along the line love had crept in and held fast, at once gradual and instantaneous.

She stood, alone in Oregon with grief and fear for company. X marked the spot.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written in a very long time. In case it's not clear, the suggestion is that love happened upon Scully way back when in Oregon; she realizes it after Mulder is abducted.
> 
> On tumblr [here](http://peggxcarter.tumblr.com/post/125813942861/x-marks-the-spot-by-doctorscully-she-wonders-when). There's also a companion piece in which Mulder reflects, [Should, Could, Would.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4616454)


End file.
